Well, one good thing about it; Phil and I have worked together, as a team, very well indeed, in the hard and painful aftermath of his father suddenly passing away early in the month. We got his funeral organised and done, we’re working on probate, and I have been cleaning and clearing out his house, which Phil inherited, and which, conveniently, is the other half of our semi. We’re still mulling over what to do next, now that Harry is gone. Do we sell one house, do we sell both houses, and move somewhere else? Or do we go ahead and reunite both houses back into one, as it originally was, when his parents, grandmother, and one of his uncles all purchased it together fifty-odd years ago?

Right now, I think we are both too shocked and sad, and too damn busy, to make a solid decision. We’re not going anywhere for the immediate future. Harry was 80, very close to 81, when he died, so to lose him wasn’t entirely unexpected — he was old, he had some of the health problems that come with age — and while he was both good and brave, and not the type to just give up, he never got over losing Phil’s mother three years previously. It was an exemplary marriage between people who loved each other devotedly for most of their adult lives, and, even after she was lost to pancreatic cancer, it was so hard to think of them as anything but a pair. I miss him dreadfully — Fridays and Sundays, when he almost always came over for dinner, are particularly hard — but the small mercy in it is that he didn’t go to a ghastly, prolonged death. It came suddenly, it was incredibly fast, and he went at home, at the end of what seems to have been a pleasant day. If the death of a fine and much-loved person can be good, then his was. I won’t call it consoling, or at least not very, but I am so glad he was utterly independent to the finish, because that mattered to him.

And he mattered to so many people. We had a full house for the funeral and the luncheon afterwards, but for the internment on Monday, it will be only Phil and me there to say the final goodbyes. We’ve spent the last month looking after the feelings of the other people who are grieving for him, but on Monday, we don’t have to be strong and capable and calm and dignified, if it’s too much.

I am a great big crybaby, but somehow, just this once, I held myself together. I was so worried I would just ugly cry at the funeral, but I did not. When Phil was giving his beautiful eulogy, I somehow managed to remain mostly dry-eyed, and composed. It was hard. I cry easily. I have always cried easily. All around me, people were crying. I still don’t know how I did it, but Phil said it helped him get through his speech.

I miss him so much. He was so good. He was a quiet man, and I am mostly a quiet woman, and we could be quiet together in the most companionable way. He got it, that I am shy and introverted, and it often takes me a while to relax and know people well enough to loosen up and be actively friendly, instead of reserved and polite, and he simply left the door open until I was able to feel comfortable, and let my actual personality show. It made me love him, possibly more than anything else ever could have. That I’ll never have another busy Friday or Sunday, running around frantically trying to shop for, and prepare, a dinner to please him, makes me desperately sad. Yes, there were times it was stressful, but by the time I’d told Phil to fetch him and bring him over, everything was ready, and it was worth every bit of effort and time. The wildly extravagant Tapastravaganza was really done for his benefit, above all else, and, as it turns out, he hardly shut up about it, once it was done. I succeeded in my secret wish to please and impress him. It felt important at the time, and of course it was, given what happened such a short time later, so there’s my own personal consolation, and it’s a pretty big one: We gave him a damn good send off, even if we didn’t know that’s what we were doing at the time.

We’re supposed to get hit by the tail end of Storm Jonas (when did we start naming winter storms?) today, and here in the generally rainy and windy northwest, we’re anticipating the worst of it. We aren’t due to get snow, alas, just more of the rain that’s been tormenting the north for the last month or so. And yet, nothing’s really happening so far, leaving me with a conundrum — do I hurry up and get dressed, and go out to get stuff done, and hope to beat the rain home, or do I resign myself to getting wet no matter what, and stay here until I’m damn good and ready to go out? The text on the Beeb’s weather page is promising watery doom, but the little cloud graphics are all merely grey, with no raindrops, so I am uncertain.

Given that I’m waiting on a load of laundry, and about halfway through a cup of coffee, probably nothing is going to be decided in the next fifteen minutes. So here’s a picture of our cat I took with my iPhone last night. Phil may be the fancy camera wizard chez nous, but I am the quick-and-dirty iPhone snap queen:

The owl and the pussycat

A noble beast, albeit kind of a stupid and slightly defective one. That manky-looking pink and beige thing in the lower left is his “raft,” and placed directly under the dining room radiator as it is, he spends quite a lot of time there this time of year. I don’t dare do more than just try to hoover up the matted fur off it, from time to time, because he will freak out and abandon anything or any place he’s previously loved if it changes in any substantial way. (See the basket in our bedroom window I ruined for him forever by a.) putting up new curtains, and b.) exchanging the nasty old fleece blankie for a soft and clean new one, as proof.) So just throwing the grimy old thing away and buying a new one is out. Still, he did better than usual as a photographic subject, by continuing to look directly at me while I took his picture, instead of moving or looking away.

We spent last night hanging around the house waiting for the quasi-nephew to show up and collect a bunch of kitchen and dining stuff I boxed up for him to take to his first flat. It is so very weird to be one of the older, more established, relatives who does the giving away, instead of the receiving, I can tell you that. It feels like most of my adult life has been spent surrounded by the hand-me-downs of kindly older relatives, and to find myself in the opposite position is kind of disorienting. But nice! I’m glad to carry on participating in the cycle in my new role! I gave him our old dishes and pasta bowls, a couple of cooking pots, and a pair of skillets, a set of water/wine goblets, and some other random bits and bobs, all of which are in great shape, but were going unused, as I have my late paternal grandmother’s addiction to dishes and serving ware, meaning every few years I just want new ones — I will never be a pricy bone china person because of this — and recently I’ve hit critical mass on swopping out many of my older pots and pans for enamelled cast-iron ones. Most of what I like to cook really needs heavy-bottomed pans, and while buying an entire set of Le Creuset in one go is probably on par with buying a freaking compact car, if you’re a TK Maxx/thrift shop shark like I am, you can slowly accumulate a collection of great stuff over time. It helps to not be overly concerned with everything being the same colour, which I am not. It also helps to not be hung up on every single piece being OMGLECREUSET, which I also am not. My latest acquisition, the jumbo dutch oven I used to cook the chili in yesterday’s post, is something I picked up at Sainsbury’s for fifteen quid, in the post-holiday clearance.

Anyway, for dinner, while I waited, I hacked together a nice salad out of about 100 grams of salmon leftover from Sunday’s starter, along with half of an avocado from same:

Leftover salad

It’s pretty similar to the one I made for Sunday dinner, which was, roughly, Nigella’s salmon, avocado and pumpkin seed salad. I add cucumbers and radishes to practically every salad I make, as they’re one of the small number of salad fruits/veg that you can pretty reliably count on being decent year-round. Also, I like them. My tomatoes I buy year-round, and resign myself to slowly and patiently ripening, accepting the occasional failure as the price of eating fresh tomatoes in winter. I know, I know, I know: this makes me a terrible excuse for a seasonal eater/locovore, but I can’t help myself. I need salad. I need it daily, or I just do not Feel Right. At least I don’t buy bags of salad and then end up throwing them away when they turn to slime, uneaten, which is evidently one of the most common ways food is wasted here in the UK. There is little that can send me into a spiral of shame and self-loathing like wasting food, something I do only very, very rarely, so I console myself with that, when I am buying non-seasonal produce. Also consoling in this regard is the compost heap. I am not wasting food, I tell myself, as I chuck another failed tomato into it, I am making more England.